KB Racing Team - The Incredibles

Written
by
John Pearley Huffman
on December 1, 2009 Contributors: David Freiburger, Ron LewisKB Racing, Greg Anderson, And Jason Line Put Together The Greatest Season In The History Of Drag Racing. It Should Have Been Impossible.

2/11Here's Greg Anderson on the road to another win, this one at the 50th Mac Tools U.S. Nationals.

KB Racing's record during the '04 NHRA Powerade Drag Racing Series season is one of the greatest achievements in the history of sports. It's right up there with the '72 Miami Dolphins undefeated NFL season; Bob Beamon's insane 29-foot, 2-inch-long jump in the '68 Olympics; the seven NCAA championships the UCLA basketball team won between 1967 and 1973; and Lance Armstrong's six straight Tour de France wins. But it's unlikely to rate even a mention in Sports Illustrated.

KB won 19 of the 23 races they could win during 2004-in Pro Stock, a class designed to guarantee close competition by radically limiting innovation. KB drivers Greg Anderson and Jason Line met each other in the final round six times, and the two cars finished First and Second in the world championship. Anderson took his second consecutive championship after winning 15 events (a record for any drag racing category), appearing in 19 final rounds (another record), winning 76 elimination rounds (yeah, a record), qualifying first 16 times (a record), accumulating the largest margin of victory by points for a season ever (742), setting a new low-e.t. record for the class (6.661 seconds at 207.75 mph) and sewing up the championship earlier in the season than anyone has ever done before (by September's O'Reilly Fall Nationals, it was all over). As for Line, his four victories were as many as all the other drivers combined, he earned the "Road to the Future" award (which is as close to naming a Rookie of the Year as the NHRA gets), and he could take satisfaction in knowing that the primary tuner on Greg Anderson's car was, well, Jason Line. Just as, beyond his own success as a driver, Greg Anderson could take pride in being the primary tuner on Jason Line's car.

They seem to be well funded, but so do Warren Johnson, Kurt Johnson, Larry Morgan, and Jeg Coughlin. The KB cars are standard Pro Stock stuff with chassis bought from Jerry Haas (Anderson's car) and Jerry Bickel (Line's), and they run the latest version of GM's DRCE big-block V-8-just like everyone else using GM-based equipment, so hardware alone can't explain their success. But spend two days with KB Racing, which we did during the World Finals, and the secret of their success becomes obvious.

3/11Jason Line's car had KB Framers as its primary sponsor in 2004, but the team is looking for a major sponsor to help support the enormous costs of racing Pro Stock.

What propels KB Racing's success is the people who make up the team. Two years ago they barely knew one another, but Greg Anderson knew them all. And Ken Black knew Greg Anderson.

At six-foot-five, 58-year-old Ken Black is pretty close to being literally larger-than-life, and he's been a die-hard drag racer since running his own four-speed Nova back in the '60s at Las Vegas' old Stardust Raceway. He's also a shrewd businessman who has started and built up a series of companies that supply the building industry in Las Vegas. If you need 1,500 houses framed in a new Las Vegas subdivision, KB Framers is the company you call. And for almost two decades there's been no better place on Earth to be in the construction business than Las Vegas-the fastest growing city in America. Ken leaves the day-to-day running of his construction businesses to his son Kenny and uses some of the (obviously substantial) profits to finance his passion, KB Racing.

For seven years Black had been in Pro Stock as a partner to driver George Marnell, and not without some success. But that partnership was fading by the end of the 2001 season and Black decided to form KB Racing. He also decided to leave the substance and structure of the team up to Greg Anderson.

4/11In the pits, Greg Anderson is in charge of Jason Line's car (left) and Line has the same duties on Anderson's car. The potential for mutual sabotage is huge, but it reinforces the team's common purpose.

"My son said to hire Greg," explains Black. "Greg had worked for George and me driving our second car in 2000 and 2001. We knew he wanted to drive. And we knew he could put together a good team. We figured we could do well."

"I cherry-picked them," says Anderson about the formation of KB Racing in 2002. "I got all the guys I wanted and I didn't have to go to my second and third choices. Everyone here knows their job."

Anderson, who turns 44 this March, had worked in racing since he was 16 and spent 12 years wrenching for Warren and Kurt Johnson. He had been in the sport long enough to form his own opinions on how a Pro Stock team should be run. And it started with where the team would be based.

Instead of basing KB Racing in his own native Duluth,Minnesota, or Black's Las Vegas, Greg Anderson stuck it in Mooresville, North Carolina, where they've heard of drag racing, but live for NASCAR. After all, it's in the many NASCAR team shops that nestle into the suburbs and small towns surrounding Charlotte where the world's development of carbureted, pushrod, racing V-8s is centered. If the roundy-round boys were going to be spending all that money squeezing each additional thousandth of a horsepower out of archaic (in racing terms at least) technology, then why shouldn't KB piggyback their expertise?

5/11Teammates Greg Anderson...

The first critical hires Anderson made were Jeff Perley, who had been working on GM's efforts in the NHRA Sport Compact series, and Rob Downing who had been crewing for Mark Pawuk's Pro Stock team. Perley is Canadian, compactly built, and bounces from task to task like a superball. He's been in racing virtually his entire life. Downing, on the other hand, is tall, lean, analytical, and an engineering graduate of the University of Nebraska. On race weekends Perley seems to always have a clutch pack in his hand hauling it into one of the team's two car carriers for refacing, while Downing stares at a computer monitor trying to find some demon buried in the blizzard of data downloaded from the cars on their last runs. They're complementary personalities: Perley is action oriented, while Downing seems patient, contemplative, and inquisitive. "Jeff is good at quick decisions," explains Downing. "I'm better at looking at data." If they have arguments, they're not letting anyone else in on them. And at the track they seem to reach conclusions together without wasting their time on something as inefficient as conversation. "It just seems to work out," claims Perley.

Perley and Downing may be the crewchiefs, but it's Greg Anderson who sets the tone and agenda for the team. And it doesn't hurt that he is a spectacularly consistent driver too. Even though the team was brand-new, success came rapidly and Anderson won two races during 2002 while finishing third in the season points battle. And pushing their advantage meant more people had to come aboard for 2003.

6/11...and Jason Line, finished one-two in NHRA Pro Stock points.

Jason Line, 35, and like Anderson a native Minnesotan, was recruited out of the Joe Gibbs Racing NASCAR shop where he had been a dyno operator preparing engines for Tony Stewart and Bobby Labonte. A longtime drag racer at the sportsman level (he won the NHRA Stock Eliminator national championship in 1993), he had to take a pay cut to work for KB but gained a seat in the team's second Grand Am.

With Line running a few races (debuting with a spectacular crash at Columbus) and Anderson on the whole schedule, 2003 was the sort of year most drag racers dream about-Anderson won 12 races and the championship. But it was merely a prelude to what was coming for 2004.

The KB Racing team is extremely disciplined and extremely methodical at the track. Between runs, the cars come back to a common pit area set up between the two transporters and under their canopies. With almost no talking, the noses, doors, and rear tires of the cars come off and blankets go over exhaust headers and front tires both to keep prying eyes off those areas and to keep other teams wondering what's under the blankets. Line and Anderson go to work adjusting the valves on each other's cars while Perley extracts the clutches for refacing, being careful to cover the discs so no one actually sees the surface machined onto them. By the time they've been called to the line for the next round, the parachutes have been repacked, the cars thoroughly inspected, the nose and doors reassembled, and any tweaks that needed to be made are made. What KB does doesn't look any different from what any other Pro Stock team does between rounds, except that it happens so quickly and so silently.

7/11The pace at which the crew services the cars will make you feel really lazy.

While the team members work, most of the people in the pits are family (Anderson's wife Kim and his parents, Line's parents, a whole slew of Blacks) sitting back and basking in the glow of their relatives' success. Except for John Force's pit there probably isn't a more popular stop for fans right now than the KB compound. After all, success does attract attention and that attention quickly turns into responsibilities.

Despite the name, there's often very little that's either "stock" or "pro" about Pro Stock. Many of the teams aren't much more than hobbies for rich guys, and significant sponsorships from consumer products companies are rare. KB Racing may in fact be a hobby for Ken Black, but the team itself is truly professional and has the feel of permanence-of an operation that's going to be around for a good long while.

It's hard to imagine KB Racing matching its 2004 performance much less exceeding it in 2005.Yet, having picked up Summit Racing sponsorship for Anderson's car midway through 2004, the team is stronger going into the season than they were last year. They'll start in a pair of new Grand Ams but will have to manage a switch to new GTOs sometime during the year as Pontiac emphasizes that model in its marketing.

8/11One of Rob Bowman's most critical instruments is an altimeter bonded to an advanced-composite personnel-lifting system using the latest in chemical-adhesive technology. His adjustment tool is as imilarly trick carbon-injected recording instrument.

The economics of Pro Stock are exceptionally cruel and even with the Summit backing and the $515,000 in prize money Anderson alone earned last year, the team is "still too much of a drain on Ken Black," says Anderson. Black meanwhile is concentrating on finding sponsorship for Line's car to defray the $1- to $1.5-million a season he admits to putting into the team. A major sponsor for Line's car would, he says, put the team at about break-even.

It's also tough to sustain the near-miraculous chemistry of the personalities on the KB team. How long before someone even richer than Ken Black offers Perley, Downing, or Line their own opportunity to do what Anderson has done? How long can they all tolerate the brutal schedule that has them putting in 100-hour weeks even in the off-season? Will they all still want to travel to every race when they have wives and kids at home? It's going to be tough. Meanwhile Anderson, Line, Perley, and Downing have big plans. They're bringing ever more of their cylinder-head development in house and ultimately would like to build their own chassis. They're not really competing against other Pro Stock racers right now, but striving to achieve some sort of metaphysically ideal combination of engine, clutch, transmission, wheelie bar, and tire tuning that will result in a perfect blast down a quarter-mile.

The team's restlessness was obvious in Pomona, just minutes after Line and Anderson had yet again met in the final round (after again qualifying one-two). KB's co-crewchiefs Jeff Perley and Rob Downing were almost inconsolable. "We blew it," mumbled Perley. "We wanted to give them something and we just missed the setup."In the rapidly cooling mid-November Sunday twilight, the two Grand Ams just didn't do what Perley and Downing had hoped. Instead of running in the 6.60s, Anderson ran a 6.722 and Line a 6.825-nowhere near the potential they knew they were capable of. Keep in mind that in Pro Stock, "nowhere near" means a couple hundredths of a second. Of course they won the race. But so what? "We know all our shortcomings," said Perley.

9/11Rob Bowman (left) and Jeff Perley (right) work as co-crewchiefs because, "One guy just can't think about all that we have to think about," per Bowman.

Hero worship: F1 vs. Pro Stock
While KB Racing was setting a new standard for Pro Stock, the Ferrari team was doing the same thing in the parallel motorsports universe of Formula One. Formula One and Pro Stock couldn't be more dissimilar, but these two teams dominate their respective sports so completely they can only be compared with each other.

There is however one area where Ferrari has KB completely beat-its '04 championship was Ferrari's fifth in a row. KB's streak only runs to two. So give KB another three years, but even then, we doubt NHRA stars will reach F1 income levels any time soon. Check the figures we came up with below.

Schumacher-It's expensive to live in Switzerland and cheap to live in North Carolina. Right?

*Hot Rod's wild-ass guess based on NHRA winnings and inexplicable hunches about endorsements and salary.

**Forbes magazine "World's 50 Highest Paid Athletes 2004." Schumacher is number two on the list with a salary from Ferrari reportedly approaching $40 million and his face plastered on dozens of endorsed products in Europe.